A Little About Hot Pepper (Not the Japanese Food Site) – 英会話・英語　アミック

One thing I’m really looking forward to putting on my taste buds when I get back to America is spicy food. In particular, I miss hot sauce—in U.S. supermarkets, it’s not uncommon to see shelves holding 50+ varieties of the stuff to choose from.

I also decided that making my own hot sauce would be a perfect hobby for me: it seems cheap enough, involves cooking, and allows plenty of opportunity for tinkering and tracking within a spreadsheet.

What I won’t be doing however is trying to see how insanely hot a sauce I can make—I’m more of a flavor-over-brawn kind of guy. Thankfully, most of the world’s hottest peppers aren’t sold on the open market, so I won’t have to worry about accidentally throwing one of the world’s three spiciest peppers (as measured by Scoville units, or SHU) into my batches.

Pepper X (3,180,000 SHU)

Created for the YouTube series “Hot Ones” (where celebrities are interviewed while eating increasingly spicy hot wings), Pepper X is the heinous result of breeding together spicy varieties of bonnet pepper. Currently, it can only be found (in very diluted form) in the “Last Dab” hot sauce made by the company of the same name as the web series. 

Dragon’s Breath (2,480,000 SHU)

Another Frankenstein creation, Dragon’s Breath was conceived by a British chili farmer and university researchers. Ironically, this tiny pepper was not bred for its heat, but instead for its flower-like appearance. The responsible researchers even pose that it could be used as an anaesthetic. 

Carolina Reaper (1,569,300 SHU)

This contribution in the pepper arms race is a product of the PuckerButt Pepper Company in South Carolina. The reaper will make you do just that, and then some—in 2018, a man was hospitalized after eating one, complaining of severe headaches. It doesn’t, however, seem to bother mice: